A first-rate, riveting chronicle of a real-life industrial conflict and tragedy.
Selleck and Thompson recount a 1990s Canadian labor dispute that precipitated violence, sabotage, and the startling deaths of nine gold miners in this nonfiction work.
The trouble started when Royal Oak Mines took control of various gold mines in Canada. One of those was called Giant, located in the mining town of Yellowknife, where Royal Oak CEO Margaret “Peggy” Witte implemented “vigilant supervision” over the employees. This didn’t sit well with Giant’s union, the Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers, especially as Royal Oak essentially dismissed the union’s grievances that had piled up during the mine’s ownership transfer. When the collective agreement expired in March 1992, a strike was inevitable. Negotiations only led to bad blood between the company and the union, and Royal Oak brought in contract workers, or “strikebreakers.” Violent incidents ensued, including a riot, mine break-ins, and the sabotage of equipment. In September of that same year, an explosion took the lives of nine men working in the mine. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who were already policing the labor disputes, suspected the explosion was intentional and searched for a saboteur as the unforgiving strike continued. Selleck and Thompson, who first wrote about this dispute as journalists for local publications, here deliver a scrupulously researched narrative packed with detail. Concise, journalistic prose effortlessly moves readers through a variety of interviews, from union members and strikebreakers to Royal Oak staff and RCMP officers. The narrative covers the months leading up to the strike and the murders, as well as the long-running stalemate between the company and CASAW, followed by years of fallout. The authors include background on the man who ultimately confessed to the murders and cover the interrogation that led to his confession and his eventual trial. Selleck and Thompson further bolster their account with a bevy of high-quality photos of relevant sites and people and provide a welcome focus on each of the nine victims.
A first-rate, riveting chronicle of a real-life industrial conflict and tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781038306241
Page Count: 462
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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